In the break room of the Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford sits a bookcase filled with ceramic replicas of bedpans.
The bed pans are a homage to the work carried out by Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, and their colleagues in the 1940s at the department making penicillin and demonstrating its efficacy in fighting bacterial infections.
They used bedpans as enormous flasks to culture the Penicillium notatum mould. When I was a PhD student in the department, I used to gaze on the simple, beige vessels and sense the gravity of the research being carried out by my colleagues.
While I was, admittedly, a bit of a dilettante by comparison, I spent my days surrounded by scientists committed to one of the highest human callings: the prevention and treatment of disease. Perhaps no achievement in human history shows our promise than the global eradication of the smallpox virus in the 1980s.
For years, the poliovirus was the target of a similar eradication campaign that was slowly closing in on success. Now, Israel threatens to undo much of this work through its terrorisation of the Palestinian people. …..more
